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Senator Bennet Runs as a Newcomer

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado was in a K Street conference room Thursday morning, the guest speaker at an insider’s breakfast with two dozen Washington reporters and columnists.

A Democrat in his first term, Mr. Bennet sought repeatedly to cast himself as a newcomer to the city, an outsider and a critic of Washington politics — a reluctant participant in the partisan debates surrounding the country’s economic crisis.

“I’ve been here for 21 months. I’ve never run for office before. The first time my name has ever been on the ballot for anything was the primary election,” he said. “ Unlike a lot of people here, I spent my entire life outside of politics. … Washington is really long on people who have spent their entire careers running for political office.”

The anti-Washington message is no accident as Mr. Bennet plunges into his first general-election campaign; his Republican opponent is Ken Buck. Ads run by the Club for Growth began running last week portraying Mr. Bennet, who was appointed to his post, as a creature of Washington.

“What’s happened to Michael Bennet?” the ad asks. “After only 18 months in Washington, he acts like he’s been there forever. Mr. Bennet voted for record spending and national debt. Voted for big government health care. … How does any of that help Colorado?”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee began advertising Wednesday with a spot that hits Mr. Bennet for his vote to pass the $787 billion stimulus bill early in 2009. “I voted for it, and I’m glad I did,” Bennet is shown saying in the ad, which concludes: “More spending, higher taxes, jobs lost.”

At the breakfast this morning, hosted by Third Way, a moderate Democratic group, Mr. Bennet sought to walk a fine line on the stimulus vote, saying that the legislation had “value, there’s no question about that,” in keeping the country’s economy from collapsing. He said it “saved us from falling into not just the worst recession since the Great Depression, but another Great Depression.”

But he also reiterated his opposition to President Obama’s proposal for another $50 billion in infrastructure spending, saying that Colorado residents “would like to see the current recovery money spent before we’re talking about any new money at all.”

And he tried to explain a comment he made last month that the country has “nothing to show for” its $13 trillion debt. Mr. Bennet said efforts to shore up the failing economy, while necessary in the short run, had not gone far in creating long-term value.

“From the point of view of building an architecture for the 21st century, we haven’t come close,” he said.

Bennet repeatedly described himself as a former schools superintendent and Mr. Buck as an extremist whose positions on abortion, Social Security and student loans were “extreme and out of step with the people of my state.”

The election on Nov. 2, he said, will be a “choice between somebody who has biz experience, who has never been a politician before … versus a candidate who is, you know, going to solve the economic crisis with a whole bunch of sound bites that got us into this mess in the first place.”

Owen Loftus, a spokesman for Mr. Buck, said, “Michael Bennet and the Democrats have spent over $2 million trying to paint Ken as an extremist. … They are false and misleading.”

Mr. Loftus said Bennet was “trying to make this an election about cheap shots.”

“It’s going to be about jobs, about spending and about his record,” Mr. Loftus said.

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